City council changes meeting schedule for 2023

With winter snow quickly approaching, Saskatoon city council is looking ahead to next year by making some changes to the 2023 meeting schedule.

Council voted to move general business meetings from Mondays to Wednesdays and adjust the start and end times of meetings.

Council has often met on Mondays from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m., followed by a break before a public hearing beginning at 6 p.m. and running until 11 p.m.

Beginning in January, meetings will be held on Wednesdays from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., followed by public hearings from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. End times could be extended by a unanimous vote of council.

Coun. Darren Hill was the only council member opposed to the changes, and he wondered why there was no consultation from administration prior to the matter appearing before council, saying the changes will limit public input.

"I won't be supporting this as presented today," Hill said. "Not every organization has the ability to be here and speak to us during working hours."

City Clerk Adam Tittemore said the proposed times would cut down on sessions running late, based on data from the last two years of meetings while also giving the public two more days to prepare for a meeting as agendas will be posted the Wednesday at 4 p.m. the week before the meeting.

While that's fine with Hill, he wondered how the meeting time changes will impact the makeup of council in the future.

"Starting at 9:30 is going to restrict who can be on your city council. You're going to be limited to career politicians," he said.

Coun. Zach Jeffries was quick to remind Hill that council hasn't previously done public engagement for changing meeting times, like in 2014 when sweeping governance changes were introduced.

"It goes beyond the comprehensible to suggest that somehow that what is being proposed today -- I've heard words like 'outrageous' and 'shocked' and 'offended' over the last couple of meetings -- and I think if folks are being as critically eyed as they have the last number of years then words like that do not belong with a report of this nature." he said.

Cameron Choquette, CEO of the Saskatchewan Landlord Association, was one of many signatories in a letter from various business groups supporting the changes.

"It allows us to do research, prepare written remarks or request to speak. And what we had observed over the past number of years was that Wednesday agenda release time and meetings on Monday -- it was a tight timeline," Choquette said.

While that change is welcome news for the business community, they're hoping to see administration change the way meetings are rolled out as the standing policy committee and governance and priorities committee (GPC) have become "catch all" committees where a variety of left over items are added to the agenda.

"We've observed on a few occasions over the course of the last year GPC having significantly heavy agendas across a wide variety of policy areas, which poses significant challenges not only for paid professionals ...but even more so a challenge for the general public to be able to sift through reports and to understand," Choquette said.

Hill echoed those wondering why governance and priority committees have had bloated agendas in recent months.

"I like the standard policy committee structure, but we seem to recently be using GPC as a catch all for everything that was their opposition," he said. "The problem is the agenda creation and the items that are brought forward and the stacking of the agendas."

According to the city's media relations branch, Saskatoon's city council meetings have been held on Mondays since the early 1900s.